Contents

Project Scope

As established in 2007, this project seeks to locate and annotate publicly searchable databases produced by agencies of the 50 state governments plus the District of Columbia.

Interest has been expressed in creating database listings for local governments of the 50 states, commonwealths and other outlying territories of the United States. We're open to this. It would be up to an individual to step forward and create such pages. In the case of creating pages for local governments of one of the fifty states, the documents specialist for that page would need to be consulted.

Basic Responsibilities

By adopting a project page, you are agreeing to do the following:

Check the page for broken links using http://validator.w3.org/checklink or some other method and looking for replacement URLs when needed. This should be done quarterly (around Sep 15, Dec 15, Mar 15 & Jun 15 of each year).

Annotate your databases with one or two sentences that indicate what fields can be searched in a given database and what sort of information the database records have. Indicate any special technology needs (i.e. IE only, etc)

Accept e-mail from people not comfortable with editing wikis who have additions, edits or deletions.

Getting Started

To adopt a page in this project, first send an e-mail to Daniel Cornwall, the project coordinator. Let him know whether you already are a registered user on this wiki. If you are not, a free account will be be created for you. Please also provide an e-mail address to be used for the volunteer mailing list (See below).

Once you have an account on this wiki, go to your project page and insert something like the following:

"This is an annotated list of databases produced by (Your State Here) State Agencies listed by producing agency.

If you are a registered user of this wiki, feel free to add a database to this list or fix broken links. If you're not a registered user, or are not comfortable editing wikis, you may also send an e-mail to (Your Name Here), the documents specialist for this page at (an e-mail address you're comfortable being public)."

Some people like to use "At" and "Dot" in the addresses to make it harder for spammers to grab your address. If you're not familiar with editing wikis, please check out the Wiki Editing Help pages. If you have other questions, contact the project coordinator or post a question to the volunteer forum.

Effective 7/24/2011, new volunteers must add their names and contact information to their state page and the main page within two weeks of receiving their wiki login or their states will be returned to the orphan pool. You don't need to have all of the links fixed within two weeks, just need your name and contact information.

Style Guide

The ideal format for state pages with a volunteer document specialist is as follows:

The top of the page shows the paragraph with the volunteer name, then is followed by a table of contents as in this example:

This view is accomplished by using the wiki markup language shown below:

Databases within individual departments should have database names linked to databases as this example shows:

This is accomplished by having an opening bracket, the URL of the database, a space, then the name of the database followed by a closing bracket as in this example:

Volunteer Forum

The official volunteer forum is the State Agency Databases Wiki mailing list via GoogleGroups. It is by invitation only and is intended for announcements and discussion of project issues including maintenance and promotion/marketing.

All new volunteers will automatically be signed up for the mailing list.

The mailing list is currently in the process of being built. Volunteers who have updated their pages since 1/1/2010 have already been added. Volunteers who have not updated their pages since then are being contacted. If they reconfirm their commitment, they will be added to the mailing list.

Resources

You might find the following resources helpful in your volunteer work here: